Case Study

Sales CRM case study: Instagram + Candid + Close = Millions in sales for this luxury furniture company

Ramin Assemi · December 14, 2016

Unlimited Furniture, a luxury furniture and interior design company, had built a large audience on Instagram but was looking for ways to engage their followers in sales conversations.

Using an Instagram storefront powered by Candid, they captured leads in Close and built a sales process that’s generating thousands of leads each month, and millions of dollars in sales.

Within just six months of implementing Close, they’ve seen a 10% increase in revenue, and growth has been continuing ever since.

Not only has Unlimited Furniture been selling individual furniture pieces this way, but they’ve also landed multi-million dollar interior design projects for celebrity clients by nurturing customer relationships with the help of our inside sales software.

Unlimited Furniture’s sales process, simplified

A prospect sees an Instagram image of a piece of furniture that sparks their interest.
They click on the Instagram bio link and are taken to a simulated Instagram storefront that closely mirrors the Instagram experience.
They then click on the image they’re interested in and submit their email and phone number.
This creates a lead in Close.
A designer (everyone working on leads at Unlimited Furniture is a trained interior designer) then responds to the inbound inquiries.
If the prospect doesn’t respond, automated follow-up emails (personalized with merge tags) are sent out from Close.
If the prospect does respond, the designer continues the conversation directly through Close’s integrated calling and emailing and builds a relationship to better understand the prospective buyer’s needs and help them fulfill their home decor needs.

Later, we’ll look into some more sophisticated workflows that include upsells, downsells, promotions, and repeat purchases.

Instagram influencer campaigns for lead generation

In addition to their own Instagram following, Unlimited Furniture often sees a high volume of inbound inquiries when an Instagram influencer endorses one of their products.

In a recent case, a single Instagram shoutout generated more than 200 leads in a single day for a high-ticket item.

Empowering sales teams with a flexible sales CRM

Whenever the design team sees such a sudden influx of inquiries about a specific product, they simply set up a template and respond to all these leads at once. This process takes minutes and guarantees that no leads fall through the cracks.

Running an agile sales team

Thomas Corrales, Unlimited Furniture’s CEO, is a strong proponent of experimentation. In the history of their company, they’ve tried many things: from opening retail stores, to wholesaling to department stores and much more. Even today, they’re constantly iterating their sales process.

Close is the perfect fit for this approach. It empowers each member of the sales team to quickly set up and adapt their own process, and then share winning workflows with the entire team.

Whether you’re building an audience on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest or Snapchat—Candid helps you to turn social engagement into highly qualified sales leads in Close.

“Close’s highly targeted & personalized messaging at scale makes it the perfect match for driving sales through social.”

— Daniel Whitefield, Director of Brand Partnerships, Candid

One out of five people who clicks on a product within their Instagram storefront submits their contact information.

This is in large part due to the intuitive and easy-to-use Instagram storefront provided by Candid. They’re not making prospects jump through hoops. They don’t require them to register. An interested prospect simply enters their email address and phone number.

Powerful insights from Candid’s reporting backend

When you’re using social to generate leads, you want to know what kind of content performs and who to engage.

How many leads has a specific Instagram post generated? How many of these are from mobile versus desktop devices? How many clicks, views, and new leads has any given post generated? Which accounts are creating high-performing content? Who are micro-influencers that might have a smaller, but much more engaged and valuable audience? All these questions can be answered using Candid.

Instagram + Candid + Close = Winning

The benefits of capturing leads in Close

“We could just send our prospects from Instagram directly to a purchase page in our e-commerce store, but we’re really not that interested in transactional sales. There’s a lot more value in building a relationship with our prospects,” Corrales said.

The value of relationship selling: 70% repeat business

About 70% of Unlimited Furniture’s business today comes from existing clients. How did they do this?

Apart from providing high-quality products and premium services, they have also decided to do relational instead of transactional sales.

A prospect who sends an inquiry to Unlimited Furniture will get a response not from an SDR or a sales rep, but from a trained interior designer. The focus of these interactions is not to make a quick sale. Instead, they want to understand how they can best serve the customer’s needs in the long-term.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to compete against the giant marketing budgets of publicly traded luxury furniture conglomerates,” Corrales said.

“We could spend a lot of money on advertising. But I believe that investing into the relationship with our clients, and providing value to them, is a much better way for us to grow.”

More context around sales leads with lead enrichment integrations

Especially for a less transactional, and more relational sales approach as practiced by Unlimited Furniture, having more context around your leads can be incredibly valuable.

But these prospects, especially high-net-worth individuals, typically do not want to fill out a bunch of lead capture forms. Which is why our Clearbit integration is so beneficial to Unlimited Furniture’s sales team. It provides their interior designers with valuable context, like their personal social media profiles, the company they work for and much more.

Downselling: Expanding customer base with low-priced alternatives

Many people who see one of Unlimited Furniture’s pieces on Instagram simply can’t afford the high-priced furniture. Which is another reason why Corrales decided not to just send prospects to an online store: these prospects would be repelled by the high price point.

Instead, Unlimited Furniture captures their contact information and follows up with prospects to offer a related item with a much more affordable price point. This allows them to expand and grow their customer base.

In addition to this, having all their leads in Close gives them a lot of leverage when negotiating with vendors. If there’s a lot of interest around a particular product, the Unlimited Furniture team can assess how many people have expressed interest, and request a special deal to pass on to all prospective buyers.

Using Close’s search feature enables sales reps to send a relevant promotional offer to just the right prospects. Using Close’s workflows ensures that no leads fall through the cracks.

Upselling & cross-selling: Increasing revenue from existing customers

Much more important than expanding their customer base with lower priced items is offering value to their existing customer base. When they run a special offer, they can quickly find customers who are likely to be interested in the product on sale.

Close’s Smart Views feature enables the Unlimited Furniture sales team to send only the most relevant offers to their customers.

Close to manage all relationships

Unlimited Furniture uses Close not just to manage sales leads from all of their channels and customer relationships, but also keeps track of their vendor agreements and partner communications.

The timeline view makes it easy for every person on the team to quickly get up to speed on any contact. They have a clear and accurate record of the entire interaction history, know who was involved and what has been covered in previous conversations.

Managing in-store visits and event attendees with Close

Unlimited Furniture displays their furniture and holds events for celebrity clients in their New York showroom.

Every visitor to this showroom, whether in the course of an event or during normal business hours, receives a personal consultation. All of this, including the event invitations, reminders, and attendance records are logged within Close

Managing vendor relationships

Given the wide spectrum of vendors they source products from, managing these relationships becomes a task in itself. Automatically having all interactions with these vendors logged in Close makes it a lot easier to hold vendors accountable to their agreements.

Managing partner relationships

Finally, Unlimited Furniture also uses Close to manage relationships with partnering designers and selected real estate agents to drive more business.

Real estate agents that sell to celebrity clients often need interior design services, whether it’s for the purpose of staging a home or decorating a property after it’s sold. They know that Unlimited Furniture understands the needs of their clients, and earn a commission on referred customers.

Are you in real estate? Check out our curated list of the top real estate CRMs.

From classified ads to celebrity mansions

When Thomas Corrales started selling furniture via classified ads in newspapers from a one-bedroom apartment, he didn’t know where it would lead him. Back then, Unlimited Furniture had neither facilities nor staff; Corrales even delivered the furniture himself.

Today, Unlimited Furniture is a highly-profitable market leader among privately held luxury furniture vendors and interior design companies, servicing affluent individuals all across the United States. Their average deal size is four times industry standard, with 70% of their business coming from repeat buyers.

Clients like Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, and Robert Duvall trust Unlimited Furniture.

Connecting their social audience through Candid with Close and building relationships with their clients has been a vital channel for Unlimited Furniture to bring in millions in additional sales and increase revenue by 10%.

Want to experience Close yourself? Sign up for a trial right now! (No credit card required. It takes less than 30 seconds to sign up and get started.)